


Sea Madness

by Ceara_Einin



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Mutual Pining, Sailor!Ben, Scavenger Rey (Star Wars), Sea Madness, Twitter Prompt, dreaming about each other, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:28:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22964650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceara_Einin/pseuds/Ceara_Einin
Summary: It was always the same dream. The silhouette of a woman swimming in a sea of sand. Every night he sailed towards her without getting any closer, waking up unsatisfied. He grew desperate, looking for an answer. They called it sea madness; Ben called it a vision.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 2
Kudos: 37





	Sea Madness

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a prompt from @ShipAesthetic on Twitter. Rey and Ben deserve to never have to be alone ever again.

Sometimes, Rey hears stories of the time before. Stories of lush reefs teeming with life, of crystalline waters where mermaids danced with schools of fish flashing with every color the eye could behold. As the old black coral told it, there was almost more life than the water could hold. Sometimes, Rey dreams of the time before and basks in memories that are not her own.

But dreams are fickle things, and Rey always finds the same empty water before her when she wakes. Sunlight still filters down from the surface, but it seems paler every day. Pale and harsh, whiter and ever hotter. Once, a long time ago when her tail fins were as small as clam shells, Rey would flit from sunbeam to sunbeam, basking in the gentle caress of the balmy water. Now she binds her arms in cloth and covers her torso to protect her skin.

Now she is alone, lucky to spot half a dozen living creatures when she ventures from her sandy cave to find food. Rey does her scavenging just after sunset and just before sunrise to avoid the worst of the heat, but even at these busiest times she finds the sea deserted.

All the merfolk with any sense of self-preservation abandoned this place when Rey was still a child. She watched them leave, first in droves then in small clusters and, finally, as stragglers flitting from shadow to shadow, as if there were monsters lurking in the sunlight.

There are monsters, but they do not live in the sunlight. They drop lures from the surface when the sun just starts to pierce the water and in the hour before the light fades.

It all started with the lures. They were tempting, oh were they tempting in the time before. Heavy with tender morsels of fish and shrimp, miniature feasts dangling in the water as if by magic. But the price of the feast descended swiftly from above and left only a trail of blood in its wake.

The tiny feasts brought monsters, and life fled from the water. Sometimes Rey wonders why her parents never followed the others, why they drank themselves sick on algae spirits and let themselves grow hungry enough to lunge for a lure. But she’s grown used to the solitude and the empty stretches of sea and really, they aren’t so bad. Once the loneliness sinks into your bones, there’s a comfort to the certainty of being alone.

But it’s alright. They’ll be back, her parents. One day, they’ll appear from above with a tale of grand adventures above the surface with the monsters. They’ll marvel at how tan she is, at the strength of her tail as it propels her through the water. They’ll tell her how much they missed her, how proud they are of her for surviving on her own.

One day, Rey will never have to be alone again.

* * *

Since the day Ben sailed into this cove, he’s seen her. It’s only for moments at a time, fragile seconds that slide away like the tide if he looks too hard. But like the tide she always comes back, gliding into his dreams and swimming through the shifting sands of his thoughts like they’re her thoughts too. Every night he sails after her, following the flash of her tail against the sands far beneath the waves. And every night he gains no ground. Every night he remains as far from her as before. Close enough to see, close enough to want. But never close enough to touch. Never close enough to understand.

These are strange waters, but Ben will never leave them now. Not until he knows who she is. Not until he knows the color of her eyes and the contours of her heart.

Hux and Phasma call it sea madness. Maz does too, with those unblinking owl eyes of hers. But Ben calls it a vision.

The fishing town on the coast is a ghost town now, empty as the sea it grew up beside. With fish so scarce, there was nothing keeping any of them here. They left in a steady trickle until only Ben, Hux, and Phasma were left.

Well, and Maz. Maz has eyes as old as the shore itself and she speaks of a time long gone, when the cove was thick with life and creatures with human bodies and finned tails instead of legs ruled the sea.

Maz only speaks of these fish-folk when she’s well into a bottle of rum. But Ben knows she drinks when the sun first touches the horizon as it sets, so for a month he joined her in watching the tide pull back out to sea and listened to her tell wild tales of how she swam with the mermaids under full moons and thunderclouds. When he told her about his vision of the mermaid and the call deep in his bones, Maz passed him the bottle, stared off into the sunset, and said he shouldn’t put so much stock in her stories.

He tried to tell her that the only reason he started listening to her rambles in the first place was because he was dreaming of the woman with a fish’s tail for weeks before he knew what to call her. Maz took back the bottle before he could drink and told him that there are no such things as mermaids anymore. The old woman seemed a thousand leagues away, and Ben never went back to her cramped hut again.

Instead, he watched Phasma and Hux sail off to better waters. They tried to convince him to go with them on the last functioning boat, but Ben couldn’t leave the woman, not yet. Not without ever finding her. Not without ever knowing if she’s real. So Ben didn’t argue when they said he was sea-mad, just watched them go as he started repairing an abandoned dingy on shore. Within a week, he had a patched boat strong enough to get him past the breakers.

Every morning, he wakes with the dream still echoing in his mind. Every morning, he sails across the cove before sunrise, searching the depths below for answers. He sails beyond the cove when the sun starts to lighten the sky, though the sandy ground below the waves is too far down to see.

He searches for the flash of a tail, a flicker of brown hair, a hint of freckled skin. Every morning, every day, he finds nothing but his own desperation and the mocking echo of Hux’s sneer while Phasma explained the symptoms of the sea madness.

Curious, how the madness never seemed to touch either of them.

As the weeks drag on, Ben begins to wonder if they were right and he was wrong. All this solitude on the water chasing after dreams must be playing tricks on his mind.

One night, the dream is different. The woman swims along the sand, his boat sails onward but never closer, and the wind is a useless thing in his sail. But this time, the woman glances back. He has never called for her aloud, yet she turns as if he had.

Her eyes lock with his, and Ben is lost to seas of lonely hazel. She smiles. For a moment, the distance between them seems to shrink.

Ben wakes up slumped against the cracked mast of his dingy with a burning ache in his chest. Her eyes were golden brown, bright with sunlight and heavy with something else. Could she feel as alone as he does?

Ben spends all day on the water, searching for the woman with hazel eyes and a tail that reflects the sun. By high noon he ventures beyond the cove, fighting every white-capped wave until the ocean is all he can see from horizon to horizon.

* * *

Nothing about the day is unusual. Rey is used to the quiet, to the throbbing tranquility of the empty water. She finds a small school of fish venturing into her hunting ground and feasts on the best breakfast she’s had in months.

A shadow breaks a beam of sunlight. Goosebumps scurry over her skin. The monsters left soon after the fish and her own kin; why would they return now? There has been nothing here but what a scavenger can reap for a long, long time. Long enough for Rey to learn every shape of her loneliness.

Before sunrise, she woke to a dream of a man with eyes as lost as hers. Now, as she regards the shadow of a monster’s vessel, Rey remembers the haunted gold of his eyes, the longing straining every limb he had though she couldn’t fathom what he wanted so much. Even the ragged scatter of hair across his chin and thin cheeks could not distract her from the gaze that pierced her like a spear.

His eyes were a mirror of her heart – shot through with the fierce light of hope and tempered by fear that nothing would ever change despite the hoping.

His eyes were as lonely as the hole in her heart.

Rey has no reason to remember her dream in the shadow of a monster surely come to hunt creatures of the sea. Come to hunt her, if she makes herself known.

With three pumps of her tail, she’ll be far beyond this monster’s reach.

Rey turns her back to the shadow, ready to retreat back to her cave and let her stomach rumble until sundown. Surely the monster will be gone by then. Scavenging can wait.

The monster’s silhouette passes over her, casting deeper shadows than the one she was hiding in. Rey shivers, but she dares not venture into the sunlight for warmth.

This is the first monster she’s seen in a while. She grew up dodging the narrow shadows that always preceded a net or a spear into one of her own kin. Kin in tail only, but it still meant something to Rey, before.

Now it would be everything, if only Rey had someone like her.

The shadow above calls. Something deep in her chest answers, even as every instinct and memory Rey has warns her away from the shape that stole away so many of her kin. It’s narrower and shorter than the hunter that took her parents, but the shape is familiar. So why does her heart stir in her breast with curiosity? What could be so different about this shadow from the others from long ago?

Rey has no answer, but she doesn’t care. She has been alone for too long to deny the yearning she doesn’t understand.

She doesn’t need to understand. She just needs to see it, see the monster for what it is and stare into its spear. She has to know what her parents saw as they left her. Were they close enough to see the strips of wood, to count the grains? Would they have known that the rounded bottom in the water is the bottom of a tiny ship, a living version of the wrecks peppering the sea floor?

Rey reaches out and lets the current guide her closer, closer. Her fingertips brush a pale plank that bites. She yanks her hand away, cursing. No one ever told her the monster’s boat can bite. They probably never got that close.

Rey’s finger throbs. Her skin is reddening around a sliver of wood, a fragment of the roughhewn plank running the length of the monster’s boat. She digs it out just as the ship’s shadow moves on and some warmth creeps back into the water

If she had any sense left, Rey would leave. She’d dive down and skim the top of the sands, blend in with the dead coral and find a wreck to hide in until this monster passes.

The call thrums in her bones, pulling her after the ship’s undertow.

Rey’s tail propels her upward, to the surface she’s never dared to break. She has to know what the monsters are. They brought too much death to just pass along sending shadows through the water they emptied of life.

The water warms as she ascends, though Rey avoids the pillars of sunlight streaming down towards the depths. Her heart throbs a staccato rhythm in her chest, even with the familiar press of her hunting spear bound to her back.

She breaks the surface, and the air above the water is so _cold_. Her lungs rattle around the dry air, the chill biting the tender organs. Even the darkest water never clawed at her insides like this. Rey can breathe, but her throat struggles against a coughing fit.

The arm wraps she wound to protect her skin from the sun are now her last scrap of warmth. The nearest ray of sun is close, but when Rey reaches out to it her hand is no warmer than before. Her arm aches from the effort, the air weighing her down as surely as the sea holds her up.

The surface is a cruel, cold place.

“It’s you.”

Rey remembers the monster, but when she finally finds a face above the timber, there is no monster that she can see. What is a merman doing on a monster’s boat?

She finds golden brown eyes as heavy as her own heart, and some unnamed thing in her chest calls out to lift against the weight.

He is alone. So is she.

Rey hovers at the edge of the boat, but she never looks away from the man inside. Man, not a monster. Would a monster have such soft yearning in his eyes? He holds no spear to kill her, no net to entrap her. His hands are large as he grips the side of the boat, his hair stark black with the white sail behind him. Dark moles pepper his skin, pale even with the time he must spend in the sun. The man’s face is gentle, awed, as if he’s found something he searched a lifetime for. Rey ventures closer.

She’s within arm’s reach of his hands when she notices that the lower half of him is different than her. Rather than a thick tail covered in scales, he has two long fins covered in rough brown cloth. Or perhaps his tail is split and the two flat protrusions from his tails are fins. Black tubes cover his fins and half of each tail, like Rey’s wraps cover her arms. This man is a strange creature, unlike any she’s seen or heard of before.

And yet, his hands are like hers. His fingers are wider, the fingers thicker, but it’s a hand nonetheless. Rey reaches out, the sun warm on her drying skin.

The tips of their fingers brush at the same moment their eyes find each other again. Rey feels her lips move, and she speaks the words she always longed to hear.

“You’re not alone.”

The man breathes the cold, cruel air, and only then does she realize how long he’s been holding his breath. But the touch of his fingers is warm, like dappled sunlight under the waves.

“Neither are you.”


End file.
